Waiting for the Mother Ship

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Day 117 - Barkly Homestead to Wycliffe Well

We were awake before the alarm which was a bit astonishing as it was set for 6am! Still it meant we were on the road nice and early in the cool morning air. I handed the amenity key back in at the front desk in the homestead and bought some postcards with the $10 deposit.

Just before 7am we were on the road and the sun was just reaching midway in the sky. It’s best not to travel before dawn or after dusk in Australia, the wildlife has a tendency to get transfixed by the headlights on the vehicles and stand in the middle of the road. It’s not good for your vehicle if you hit one and clearly it’s not good for the wildlife either!

We have a good few hours of travelling today and the roads are not paved with gold but they are paved with good condition bitumen and not many other travellers. The Barkly Homestead where we parked up last night is 210 kms from Tennant Creek and is on the junction of the Barkly and Tablelands highway. Travelling across the Barkly Tablelands we see no major rivers, ranges or hills and we would describe the view as vast and or featureless. However, its the 'flatness' that makes it special and it is one of the few areas of the earths crust that has remained relatively unchanged for more than 540 million years. It's also very important cattle grazing land, which again surprises us because it seems so baron but obviously it's not.

Sticking to the highway does have it’s down sides, obviously we don’t get to see too many weird and wonderful things but it’s the only way for us to get down to the centre as we can’t go off road with the caravan.

The sun is already starting to blaze down on us and we feel the coolness of the car ebbing away so we open the windows. We’ve found this preferable to having the air conditioning on all the time, we get fresh air and keep the fuel consumption down a bit plus it means we’re under no illusion that it’s darn hot outside. We always have a giggle at posh caravanners who pull up at sites, put the air con on and shut the door with them inside! What’s all that about?! You won’t see much of Australia doing that, get outside and suffer with the rest of us!!

The road stretches out before us, a carbon copy of the same kilometre over and over again! Darryl has corrected me there saying that it was in fact over and over and over and over and over again, sorry to mislead you initially! When vehicles do come into view at the other end of the highway you have to look through the binoculars to try and guess what it is, car, ute, 4WD with caravan, motor home or road train. They all appear in a haze initially and the road trains are mostly distinguishable but the rest of them take a bit longer to identify!

We count down the kms to the Stuart Highway where we turn right, just for a couple of hundred metres, to fill up the tanks at the Three Ways road side pub. We’ve not used that much but we’d rather keep ourselves topped up so we don’t run into any trouble. The pub inside looks really interesting and there is a caravan park here so we might stay the night on the way through to Darwin.

Back on the highway we’ve got a couple of hours left until we reach Wycliffe Well. Dar spots the turn off to the Devils Marbles and there’s a free camp site within the area which we were considering staying at when we’re returning back up from Alice. We drive out the camp site, it’s very sparse of shaded areas as you might expect out here in the centre of Australia! There are toilets, drop toilets by the look of it but there are fire pits. It’s an option for the return journey so we’ll see how things shape up. We go back to take a look at the Devils Marbles, huge granite boulders all precariously balanced on one another and scattered in a relatively close proximity. The Warumungu people have many stories and traditions associated with this area and how it came to be this way whilst the scientists will tell you the marbles are the remains of molten lava. We walk the self guided loop around the main site and then drive back to a second site where we find a small lizard sunning himself on one of the rocks. We’ve left the car for no more than 30 minutes but when we return the water in the bottles is red hot!

Back on the road for a reasonably short distance and we’ve made it to Wycliffe Well, the UFO capital of Australia! We’re greeted by aliens outside the front of the roadhouse and find many others dotted around the campsite! We check in, although disappointingly we’re not served by aliens and worse still the Big 4 ‘stamp’ for our passport book does not have an alien on it either. I make the suggestion and they say they’ll try and sort it out!

We find a shady spot and park up then head off around the campsite checking things out. It’s only somewhere to lay our heads for the night but it looks good fun and there’s a table tennis table in the games room! Fingers crossed somebody else comes along with a bat!!

Leaving so early in the morning means that we’ve got the rest of the day to relax, swim, write postcards, do some maintenance on the caravan and of course write the blog.

We secure a couple of beers from the extensive range in the camp roadhouse and it’s then we find the stuffed monkey on the bed in the restaurant. Sorry, that’s being disrespectful. What we should have said is it we found the Emperor of Wycliffe (who is a stuffed monkey on a bed!) and the International Doll collection which is kept behind glass doors. It’s all very intriguing / weird!

The walls in the front shop are covered in articles about UFO sightings in the local area and other places in Australia although nowhere it seems has visitations quite as frequently as Wycliffe. There are photos of people in front of the Devils Marbles with unidentified flying objects just behind them - is it a bird, is it a plane or is it indeed the ‘Mother Ship’?

Wandering around the extensive camp grounds we found all sorts of treasures, the UFO landing pad, the viewing point for ‘Mount Wycliffe’, the train tracks leading to Wycliffe Lake, the baby Emus and some scary looking doorman outside the galaxy auditorium! You have to see it to believe it really!

We hit the pool with the friendly, permanent alien residents! This place is freakishly weird isn’t it, I mean come on, have you ever met anyone so convinced that UFOs exist? Oh, yes, sorry Dar I forgot that you’ve seen one (cough, grin, wince etc). Oh no Hun, I wasn’t taking the rip at all (snigger, sly giggle etc). I do believe you, honestly! Why wouldn’t I believe that a little orange, green ball of light flew straight at you all those years ago, I mean who wouldn’t believe that, especially when you say you saw it! When’s your birthday again?!

Anyway, we enjoy the swim and then it’s back to catching up with the blog and the photos etc. We have a great dinner, no aliens join us at the BBQ to try and steal our marinated steaks! We sit eating dinner at the BBQ picnic area, the evening is very warm so we’ve got the fan on inside the caravan cooling it down, everyone else seems to have air con so they’ve all disappeared inside. The roadhouse attached to the campsite is heavily under bombardment by the local Aborigines. Lots of cars are coming in with people shouting across the pumps to one another, singing, jumping around and then zooming off again. It sounds aggressive at times but that’s just our take on what we hear, there’s no trouble and we figure it must be a regular and expected occurrence as nobody else is taking much notice. Another car drives into the fuel station, they’re playing the stereo really loudly and in England the equivalent would be some foul rap rubbish but I can’t help laughing out loud because this lot are blasting out none other than John Denver’s “Country Roads”! What have you got to say about that then Mum?!

We watch the goings on from a distance for a while, there’s kids and adults all milling around the forecourt and then they drive off somewhere else. We get chatting to another one of the campers on the site, initially about the UFOs but then about the carry on within the forecourt. She’s been coming here for years and years, it’s always the same she says but there’s never any trouble. Discussing Aboriginal heritage is a minefield and we find there are a wide range of varying opinions about them as people and the way they live their life in modern society. We have our opinions too, probably a lot more passive than others but we’ll write about that after we’ve had the opportunity to explore the culture of yester-year and today in more detail.

By 8.30 we’re whacked out and even the ‘shower before bed’ idea gives way to simply ‘go to bed’!

We didn’t get a glimpse of the Mother Ship coming to take us home tonight, something must have put them off!

Alien dreams

Dar and Sar

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Comments

[Jan Kettle]

'Take Me Home ...........'
What unbelievably good taste! and what a place to hear him - John is probably floating up there with the UFO's at this very moment.....

[Gary]

Wycliffe
I'm only a couple of months behind in reading your blog, but I will catch up. Interesting side note when we visited Wycliffe. We had dinner in their restaurant. The Chinese waitress(es) were apparently new to Australia and were quite astonished when we ate our Chinese meal with chopsticks. Laughing and giggling, looking out the kitchen doors.